Insomnia in Menopausal Women Treated with Auricular Acupuncture:HRV correlation

(Warning, this post is only for those interested in the tiny niche of acupuncture and HRV.)
Gotta love this study since it correlates HRV with treatment outcomes. Yay! Though there has been quite a bit of research on HRV and acupuncture, there has been precious little looking at whether HRV response correlates with clinical outcomes. In this study they found nLF to go down and nHF to go up in patients who had effective treatment (i.e. less insomnia) and for nLF to go up in the nonresponders. Progress! Some researchers insist that one needs to look only at non-normalized values and that HF is more predictive than LF, but we'll take what we can get.

Menopause. 2011 Jun;18(6):638-45.

The relationship of subjective sleep quality and cardiac autonomic nervous system in postmenopausal women with insomnia under auricular acupressure.

Kung YY, Yang CC, Chiu JH, Kuo TB.

Source

Institute of Traditional Medicine, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the changes in self-reported sleep symptoms and cardiac sympathovagal activity among women with postmenopausal insomnia (PI) who received auricular acupressure (AA) therapy.

METHODS:

A pretest/posttest study design was conducted at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan, from August 2008 to July 2009. Forty-five women (mean ± SD age, 56.2 ± 5.4 years) with PI (4.9 ± 3.5 years of insomnia) received an AA therapy course on five auricular points every night before going to sleep for 4 weeks. Heart rate variability (HRV), the Chinese version of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and the Menopause Rating Scale were measured before and after AA treatment.

RESULTS:

The total sleep duration and sleep efficiency were increased, and the sleep latency was shortened significantly (P < 0.01) after AA therapy. The total Menopause Rating Scale and somatovegetative subscale scores were reduced significantly (P < 0.05) after the intervention. A greater percentage change in Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index was moderately correlated with both a lower percentage change in high-frequency power of HRV (r = -0.660, P < 0.001) and a greater percentage change in normalized low-frequency power (nLF) of HRV (r = 0.599, P < 0.001). An elevation of high-frequency power and a reduction of nLF of HRV were observed in the responder group, whereas a raise in nLF of HRV was noted in the nonresponder group.

CONCLUSIONS:

This study suggests that AA intervention leads to more cardiac parasympathetic and less cardiac sympathetic activity, which contributes to the improvement of PI.

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